Abstract:

Although great strides have been made in the development of simulators for training technical and teamwork skills, much less progress has been made with regard to skill assessment. Typically, performance is measured using a rating scale with anchors ranging from"low"to"high."Such methods are too coarse to provide an accurate assessment of individual or team performance. What is needed are unobtrusive, real-time measures of individual and team states, such as cognitive load (CL). By automatically alerting the instructor to changes in CL vis--vis a historical benchmark, the instructor can modify the training scenario on-the-fly, thereby ensuring that the learners stay within the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) at all times. With this in mind, Aptima proposes to design, develop, and commercialize a fully-functional data collection, assessment, and alerting tool (ACLAMATE) that will allow instructors to dynamically modify simulation-based training scenarios. The ACLAMATE alerts will be fed by data from portable EEGs and sociometric"badges."When ACLAMATE determines that the learners are outside of the ZPD, the instructor will automatically receive an alert on the handheld performance assessment too